Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Brian Paddick, formerly the most senior openly gay police officer in Britain, has begun the process to initiate judicial review proceedings over the decision by the Metropolitan Police not to inform him that his privacy may have been compromised during the newspaper phone hacking scandal.

Openly gay Labour MP Chris Bryant and the writer Brendan Montague have also said they are looking for the courts to rule on how the scandal was handled by the police, although they haven't been named as a party in the judicial review as yet.

Tamsin Allen of Bindmans LLP, who are representing the three claimants, said: "Our clients have still not been told the whole story about how their names came to be in the papers seized during the phone hacking investigation in 2006 and why they were not warned that their privacy might have been compromised.

"The court will now determine whether or not the Metropolitan Police breached its public law and human rights obligations in the way it handled this investigation and its aftermath."

The law firm are to name the other two two claimants shortly.

In 2007, the News of the World's former royal editor Clive Goodman was jailed for conspiracy to access phone messages left for royal aides.

Goodman, along with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire – who was jailed for six months for the same charge – used mobile phone numbers and secret codes used by network operators to hack into the voicemails to see if there was any information of interest.

At the trial it emerged that the News of the World also hacked into the voicemail of Simon Hughes, the openly bisexual Liberal Democrat deputy leader. Last week, Mr Bryant, a former minister for Europe, who has been told that his voicemail was also hacked by journalists led a debate in the House of Commons over the matter. The House of Commons has announced it would conduct a new inquiry into the laws on phone hacking as well as how the police respond to allegations of hacks.